My Top 10 Best Shopify Flows I'd Implement Today

Your 1% win today is all about Shopify flows now. The reason I wanna talk about this is because you can do a lot of things right? You can have the best ads, you can be, have amazing marketing, and you can still lose. Because at the end of the day, the real thing that can kill your business isn't your cost per clicks or cost per view.

It's the chaos after the click and after the purchase and, and the operational chaos that ensues after now. Here's a few stats before I dive into it. Obviously, this one I've mentioned before, 70% of all carts get abandoned. Returns are around 16% of annual sales for stores, which represents hundreds of billions of dollars in merchandise coming back.

So if you're a store doing, I was gonna say one to 20 million, but really even beyond that, your job. Isn't just marketing. Your job is plugging all the leaky holes without hiring 12 people and putting yourself out of business because it is very tempting. As soon as something starts to get overwhelming thinking, I need a person for that.

And it's a really easy way to spend more than you have and. Put your company outta business. So today I'm gonna show you 10 awesome Shopify flows that are easy to create. We're gonna rank them starting from easy, all the way to a little bit more advanced. And I tried to pick 10 that don't require. Extra apps.

Um, the only extra ones are gonna be email and SMS because so many flows have an email or SMS aspect to it. And I, I'm assuming that everyone here has an email or SMS tool. The tool that we're gonna be using for these is Omnis Send. You can use any tool you want, but that's my preferred one. So that, that really is the only tool.

Now if you can implement these. You can save yourself so much time, potentially a head count, and make your life a lot easier. So. Shopify flow is basically if you haven't used it, it's a if this, then that kind of a process inside your Shopify admin. Some people refer to it as like Zapier.

It's really just a rule based. Flow that can trigger different events based off certain actions that happen on Shopify. So it can check conditions like certain how many times a customer has bought inventory. You name it, there's hundreds. And then you can run specific actions, like tag the customer, tag the product and change the status.

Email someone, put something on hold, post a slack, add a row in a Google sheet. You get it. So. If you have got a D two C store flow is the difference between, oh, we're scaling and we're scaling without everyday turning into a nightmare and hundreds of support tickets. So, couple quick things. Flow is available across all Shopify plans, so it used to only be on Shopify Plus, so.

If you didn't know that there was an update and you now have it on your plan, you should check. Definitely check it out. I've actually talked to a few stores that didn't think they had it because you're busy and you don't have time to poke around and everything. It's a flow app that you install. It's a free app, but it's a, it's a Shopify app and it gives you access to flow.

And it's also, you can build these flows with Sidekick now, which I've been playing around with and it's awesome. You can actually explain to sidekick that you wanna flow to do a certain thing and it will suggest a flow for it. So I'm gonna give you some really good examples here, but also play around with Sidekick and tell it what you want to do and it will build a flow for you that you can actually implement it and test it.

So, okay, so. Here's, uh, here's what I see. I see, you know, at the 1 million to 20 million ranges, everything works until volume hits. And that's when all the cracks start to show. The fraud starts slipping in. Inventory gets weird and challenging, and orders go late, returns pile up and retention becomes. A ha a habit of just discounting because operators don't lose because they're lazy.

They lose because they don't have systems. Now's the time to get these systems in, even if you're doing a hundred million a year and flow is one of the cleanest ways that you can build this fast. So most stores, they do one of two things. They set up a couple automations. In fact, the average Shopify store has less than two flows set up, which is mind-boggling.

You definitely should have more than two, but I think there's some stores that have. 20 or 30 and a lot that have zero. So, they have, they set up one or two and they kind of call it done and they just kind of keep hiring people knowing that, not knowing that there is better solutions. Or they build this kind of automation spaghetti and you go in their flows and they've got hundreds of flows.

Nobody really knows what they do, what fires them. Often, most of them are broken and everyone just stops trusting flows. So we don't wanna do either of those. We wanna build. Kind of a flow ladder and we'll start with easy, like I said, and then we'll move to more advanced. And these are examples that I think are ones that anyone can implement, but there are literally hundreds out there.

If you just go and Google and you search best Shopify flows or ideas for good flows, there's right at threads on it. There's blog posts, there's a ton. So, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but what we're gonna make sure we have is every flow will have a clear name explaining what it does. It'll have a single purpose, like it'll do one thing.

You can get overly complicated with flows that do too much, so they're gonna be one purpose flows. And an owner flows should have an owner, so, okay. So here's your operational mindset approach. We're gonna be thinking like an operator, not a, not a marketer. So we start with an internal alerts and tags and we do inventory and fulfillment, and then we're gonna do fraud and returns, and then we're gonna do retention and win back.

And that's how today's list is organized. So let's get into it with flow number one. I just call this the slack high five. And this is the easiest one to set up. Okay. Remember we're going easiest to hard here. So what this does is when a high value order comes in it. Ping slack and it tags the order. And so basically what it does is when an order is paid, if the condition is over a certain threshold, so what, whatever is a high value order for you, um, the action is gonna be you send a Slack message and you add an order tag high value.

And what adding that order tag does is it lets you filter by that in your order Admin also lets you trigger different actions from it as well. So here's how you set this up. You're gonna go into apps and Shopify Flow. First of all, this is Shopify Flow is an app that you install. You click create Workflow trigger order paid, and then condition is gonna be order total.

And now choose what you consider a high value order that you wanna get notified. Is that 250, 500 a thousand. It's gonna be different depending on your average order value of your store. But choose what is a high order value. Now your action. Is gonna be slack. Send message to orders channel, or call it a high value orders channel, whatever your channel is in your store.

Okay? And also action add order tag, and I use just high underscore value, and then click turn on. And then it's done. And now you're gonna stop missing those moments where you should be reaching out to someone or upgrading someone's shipping or adding a gift or a note or a little white glove service or something.

So those customers remember like. The, the 80 20% rule is true, it's more like 90 10. Like there's gonna be 10 to 20% of your customers that you make 80 to 90% of your revenue on. So you want to make sure that they are easily identified. You see them, you know them, you get pinged when they come in. Um, so this first flow does that.

That's the slack high five flow. Okay? Number two, we're gonna call this the VIP stamp Now. What this does is it's, it's actually sounds simple, but you can do a lot with it. So it's gonna automatically tag VIP customers once they cross a threshold and it will alert your team. And so how this works is when an order is paid, you're gonna have a condition and you can pick a number of orders.

So, uh, the condition can be order count greater than two, greater than three, greater than five, whatever you. Constitutes a VIP customer or total spent condition, total spent greater than 500,000. And then the action add customer tag, VIP, and also I would add action slack ping to message a certain channel.

Now, I would also. Trigger an email with Omnis send. So this can be an action that triggers a event in Omnis. Send and you can have these automations set up. Just call it became VIP, and this can trigger a whole flow. That sends out a series of emails that, first of all, notifies them. Thank you you for becoming a VIP customer.

You can give them some exclusive offer. Some, let them know about your loyalty program because they've spent so much let 'em know about some early access to some products coming up, but it can actually trigger a whole flow. Now, I'm gonna give you one bonus tip here because we have a, a, an. A perfect app for this at Bold.

It's called Custom pricing, and what it does is it lets you change the price for different customers based on their tag. So if you've got a VIP customer who, whatever that is, they've spent a certain amount or bought a certain amount, give them VIP pricing this. Does wonders to retention. Um, so after they've spent a certain amount trigger that email flow with Omnis, send, let them know they became a VIP, but also they've locked in VIP pricing of 5% off, 10% off.

And with the custom pricing app, they don't have to do anything. There's no coupon codes or anything like that. They just log in. So like as long as that customer logs in, they literally see all the prices on the website change. And what I would recommend is actually have multiple tiers. So you have this flow set up, and then you have another one called VIP Gold.

Or VIP platinum and you can have, you know, 5% off for the first level, 10% off for the next level 15. And let them know in that email from Omnis send, like you just unlocked, you just became a VIP customer. You'll now, when you log into your store, you'll see all the prices have been reduced to your VIP price, which is 5% off everything after you spend.

A thousand dollars more, you will unlock VIP gold pricing, which is 12% off everything, whatever it is. That is really easy to do with the custom pricing app. You can, it doesn't change anything on your site for any other customer. Only when VIP customers log in, so, I'll put a link to that as well too.

I don't generally promote our products, but we just happen to have one that is. Perfect for this one. And so why not? Okay. The third flow I wanted to highlight was, uh, what I call the first order launchpad. And this is just a flow that identifies first time buyers and it triggers a special post-purchase automation for in omni send just for them.

So, uh, the trigger is order paid and you wanna have a condition of order count equals one, and then the action is gonna be add order tag. First underscore, underscore order, and then set up an action in Omnis. Send and you can call it whatever you want, but first order paid, which then kicks off a full automation series.

Now, when you have someone who places an order for the very first time, you wanna send them more details about how to use the product, how to set it up expectations, and send some, you know, that's on day zero. Like the first day they order it on the second or third day. Send some UGC like videos from your customers, some tips and tricks.

On the fifth day, send some companion product recommendations or add-ons or maybe replenishment after day 20. Now, some of those things you also wanna send to a customer who's ordered many times from you, but there's certain things you wanna send specifically to someone the very first time they order from you.

Remember when you get a first order? You don't have a customer and you have a lead. It's someone who's trying you out. They're trying your product. They're definitely not committed. They're not a repeat customer for life. They're trying you, so your job is to win them over. So anyways, this flow is great for that.

You can also have it trigger an event that goes to Slack. So you get notified. It's a first. First time customer, maybe you wanna reach out, maybe you wanna thank them. I, that all depends, but for sure trigger a custom email series with Omnis send or whatever email you use. Number four, I call this one the fulfillment snooze alarm.

So what this one's gonna do is it alerts your team if an order goes unfulfilled for 24 hours. So, things get missed. People forget to ship. Something gets stuck or I don't, for whatever reason. This is an alert to make sure that it doesn't sit past 24, because when it does, that's when those negative reviews start happening and the support tickets, it costs cost, time, cost people.

So it's very easy Trigger is gonna be when order created. And your action is wait equals 24 hours and you're gonna have a condition if still unfulfilled, create an action. Send message to Slack or Slack message to have a channel called Ops or. 24 plus hours, something where you get alerted. So you know, so when there's, every day you go in, if there's any orders in there past 24 hours, you can address it.

I would also have an add an action on this flow called add order tag late in my Shopify order panel that I can see any order over 24 hours. And so, if you have that tag late ship or 24 plus hours, whatever, create a search in your order admin for all orders that have that tag and then save that view.

And then every time you come into your order admin, you can see any order that's over 24 hours that you can address really quick. This is gonna, um, make a huge impact in all those emails. Whereas my order, um, the negative reviews, people complaining on social media, all those things that you wanna get rid of.

Okay, number five. We're slowly, we're getting into kind of like the medium level hardness now. So this one's called the fraud freeze, and it's not that hard. I call it medium, but it's, it's pretty easy, but it's it's gonna automatically hold fulfillment for high risk orders and alert your team. So what this one how to set this one up, you create a trigger and it's called order risk analyzed.

So that means that. Shopify has analyzed order risk. That's the trigger order risk analyzed. Your condition is gonna be high risk, so the trigger, if it analyze risk and then the condition, high risk, there's gonna, there's different conditions, or sorry, different levels of risk that Shopify analyzes an order.

But if it's high risk, then you're gonna set an action. Hold fulfillment, and I, I would set another action tag order. Fraud underscore review. And then you wanna have an action that posts a slack to a message fraud review channel and also sends an internal email. So maybe you have an email that goes to a specific person on your team, or a group of people that need to review any order that is high risk.

Shopify doesn't automatically stop and order because it has high risk. Like this is up to you if you want to. Hold fulfillment and review it. So maybe you want to look up the person's address, look up their email. Um, there's databases. You can put people's email in to see if they've been reported for fraud on other websites.

But what this does is you just, you stop shipping obvious fraud orders without. Slowing down and you don't have to slow every other legitimate order, right? You want everything who's legitimate to go out fast. But ones that potentially are, are fraud. It's okay to slow those down a little bit because those lead to chargebacks, which you get too many of those, you pay higher credit card rates or you can even lose your ability to charge on a credit card and lots of bad things.

So this is a great one to set up. The fraud freeze. Uh, that was number five now, number six the low stock siren. This is, uh, an alarm that when a variant drops below a certain threshold, it will alert slack and it can log it also in Google Sheets, so you have a log of anything that's low stock. There's other ways to do this, but I find this just an easy kind of way to keep your finger on the pulse of, of your stock.

So, uh, the way you set this up is you're gonna create a trigger that inventory quantity changed. So that's the trigger. So inventory quantity changed. Now the condition. Is gonna be less than whatever here, less than five, less than 10. And this depends on obviously the velocity of how you sell your products.

If you sell 20 a day, well. You might wanna get alerted when it's less than 50. But when you get within less than maybe a week's worth of inventory or whatever your lead time is to get more inventory in, that's when you want to probably get alerted. So then the action is add product tag, low stock. So that adds a tag to the product low stock, and then.

I would also send another action to send a Slack message, and you can send this with the sku. So the, the item plus number remaining. So this will send a, um, specific message to a Slack channel and it'll say, you know, Nike whatever shoe 17 remaining. And it's just a, a good alert to have, like really be on the pulse of your inventory.

Uh, you can of course go in Shopify and run all these reports, but. You know, people don't do that all the time. And I dunno, maybe someone just buys a whole bunch one day and get, you get caught off guard. So it's a great way to have your finger on the pulse on this. I would also add an action to Google Sheets to add row to a reorder tracker.

So, if you're reordering once a week or something, you have a Google sheet that has a row for every single thing that you need to reorder and then. Obviously the next one that we're gonna do is the back in stock reminder. I call this the back in stock beacon. So we had the low stock siren, and even though we have that, things still go outta stock, but then we wanna do something when they come back in stock.

And so this is the back in stock Beacon is when a variant. Or any product comes back in stock, it will trigger an Omnis send message to people who care about that product and who might be interested in coming back in stock. And so the way this works is you are gonna set up a trigger variant back in stock.

That's your trigger. Your action is gonna be. Remove low stock tag. 'cause remember earlier in the last one we added a low stock tag. So this one is gonna remove that. That's, well, that's optional. You don't have to do that. But if you did the previous flow, you'd wanna have that on there. Uh, then you're gonna have an action for Omnis send to trigger event back in stock, or whatever you called it in Omnis now.

You set up this automation and omni send, this can send an email, an SMS an automation to notify subscribers that, hey, your the product, this product is back in stock. It can email specific people or it can email everyone, like if it's or if engaged, engaged customers and, and maybe it's something or people who have been added.

In to your list in the last 90 days, let's say maybe like, maybe not people from years ago, but um, you know, you often get these back in stock emails that it's not something you specifically clicked on to like say, notify me when back in stock. But it's kind of secretly a great marketing tool. So when something is back in stock, it sends to everyone who's new on your list in the last 120 days.

And. It's a way to just kind of create excitement and, and buzz. So, uh, that's called the back in stock beacon. Okay. The next one is the return deadline bouncer. So what this one does is it cancels returns that were approved but just never shipped back after a certain number of days. And this happens a lot.

A customer submits a return, but they just don't get around to sending it back. Or they man maybe decide to keep it or they give it away or something. Like, I, I've done this before. I've created a return. And then just never returned the product. And then these, un uh, unfinished returns just sit like a zombie graveyard full of unopened returns.

But it also can cause issues with inventory because it ties up another inventory depending how you have your return system set. So there's a number of issues with it. So it's good to clear these out. It's really simple, this flow, you just will create a trigger called return approved. So that's your trigger.

Now, whatever the date is, you're gonna set an action for wait equals 14 days or whatever. Your acceptable return time is. So when someone creates return, do you give them 14 days, you give them 30 days, whatever that is. So action. And then it's wait equals 14 days, let's just say, and then a condition. If return not closed.

So the trigger is return approved, then wait 14 days, and then condition if return, still not closed. Action, set up an action, cancel return, and then I would also set up another action. Post a Slack message to a support challenge, just saying, return this return for this person. This email canceled. It just notifies the Slack team.

Makes it easy for them to see if that person's submitting a ticket, that there's a log of it there. So this kind of just cleans up all those, uh, open returns, but also any inventory that's kind of tied up in limbo for them when they come back, which you don't wanna have. Number nine. The return abuse radar.

This one tags repeat customers, sorry, not repeat customers, repeat returners who have a bit of a habit of returning things too much so you can handle them a little bit differently without punishing everyone. And so the way this one works is that you're gonna have a trigger when a return is approved and then you set a condition, which is customer already tagged.

Has return. So to set this up, the trigger is return approved. Now when someone. Initially creates a return, you're gonna wanna make sure you tag them, has return. But this one will have the condition customer tag contains, has return. And if it does, then you create a, you say Yes branch, you create a branch, and then you say add repeat returner.

So you add that tag to them. And then I would also send a Slack message to support so that, so they're aware of it. And then if they don't have that tag, so if they don't have the tag has return, then I would have no branch. And then just add the tag has return. You wanna give them that normal return.

And then a kind of a cool thing you could do here is you could track an Omnis send event and call it return approved or repeat returner and. I would recommend suppressing your aggressive promos to this segment. So if you've got someone who. Is a known repeat returner, suppress them to your big sales because they just have a high chance of returning.

I dunno, that one's up to you, but I think that one's worth considering. Returns are very costly. They cost, they can, you know, if you get 20% of customers that return something, it kind of wipes out all of the profit from a sailor promo you run. So suppressing them might be a good idea. Okay, the last one.

The win back ladder. I'm calling this a ladder because there's a few steps in it, but, uh, what this one does is when a customer lapses you know, and that might be basically after 60 days, 90 days, 120 days, whatever you consider a customer lapse. This was gonna trigger an omnis send win back automation.

So here's how it works. You first of all build a segment in Shopify. So if you go to Shopify, go to customers, go to segments, uh, you can create a segment and set, create that with the last order date of however many days you want. Let's call it 90 days. So build that customer segment. 90 days. Now in flow, you're going to create a trigger customer joined segment.

So. Segments are, if you haven't played around with segments, are these predefined groups of customers based off of a rule that you define. Now in flow, the trigger is as soon as a customer joins them, you know, these segments can be off of like a whole bunch of different criteria, what they buy, how much they buy certain products, how much they spend visits, all kinds of stuff.

So trigger customer, join segment, and then action is gonna be an Omnis send event. And enter Win back. Now in Omnis send, I would have, this is where the kind of the ladder, I call it a three Touch ladder series where. The first touch. So they, they haven't ordered for 90 days now they're gonna get an email.

What's new bestsellers? Something to just kind of warm them up. You know, they haven't bought from you for a while. Let's send them what's new. Send them some bestsellers that's touch one, touch two, send them some more proof some more UGC, some reviews something, uh, just to kind of reinforce the value of your product.

And then touch number three. Only if needed. You can set rules in, in Omnis send where if a customer converts from one of an email, you don't continue the automation. So like, if they don't buy from email one or email two in the automation, or you can have multiple emails there. This could be email, 1, 2, 3, 4.

Have a unique offer. And I'd say this only if needed because. If they buy, you don't wanna then offer them 20% off a product that they just paid full price for. So make sure you set that to only trigger if they didn't convert on one of the previous ones. And this is a great way to win back customers, keep them engaged.

And remember, every single time you get a customer to reorder, you increase. The chances of them reordering again and the exact numbers, it's, it's actually staggering. It's like if you get a customer to order a second time, there's like, I forget what it is. It's like there's a 46% chance, no, sorry. You increase the chances of them order ordering a third time by 46%, and if they do order a third time, it increases the.

Chances of them ordering a fourth time by 58%, it goes up each time they become more loyal, better customers. So getting them to order a second time and a third time is so important. Okay, so those are the 10. I'll put them in the show notes as well too, like just the bullet points of the what the actual triggers were and actions and all the rules.

Um, I don't have visuals for all of these but I think you'll get it from the bullet points of just what the actions are. I just kind of made the notes. So now here's the key. Most stores are gonna still fail with flow because like I said earlier, they, they build one and. It fires once or twice and they just stop, or they build too many and they don't know what any of them do.

And their flow directory is a, is a mess and no one knows how to operate anything, so they just avoid it. So here's. Your operator rule and kind of guidelines, build three today. Don't go out and build all 10 of these. Just build three and start with the easiest ones, the slack high five, the fulfillment, snooze alarm.

You know, if an order sits around for 24 hours, the low stock siren, just build those three. The easy. Pretty much every store should have those. Can't think of many stores that wouldn't want that. And just start with those three. Make sure they work, make sure there's no issues, it's clear. Give them names that everyone understands.

And then next week, build three more. And then next week, three more. And then don't just stick to the ones that I listed here. Go out and do some research. There's literally hundreds of different ideas out there of, of flows you can build because. At the end of the day, if you're doing any kind of revenue on Shopify flows are not a nice to have.

They are operational requirements, and it can be a headcount if you, or sorry, it can be a headcount you don't need to hire. So pick three today go out, build them, and then when you save a couple hours a week, don't celebrate. Build the next one because the stores that are gonna be winning in the next.

Few years are ones that have operational excellence. Okay. And the last flow I want you to build is a flow directly from this episode to the podcast player that you're listening in Apple Podcast, Spotify to the review section. And I want you to click that five star review. I wish I could build a flow that a listener listens to the podcast and then goes and leaves a review.

But I have to ask you and they mean a lot. They're actually the main way that this show gets recognized. It helps with our rankings and it helps other people find out about it. I read every single one, so if you leave review and you write something in there, I read it, and if you do, let me know. Shoot me an email.

Because we do have gifts for people. Um, just kind of some something special. Uh, it's JJA y@shopifyonepercent.com. Thank you so much. It means the world. Make sure you're subscribed so you get notified every time we release a new episode. And I will see you on the next episode.